Four Letters, Everywhere: Jayson Love and the Art of Spreading LOVE

From Los Angeles walls to Japan, Salvadoran artist Jayson Love Valencia has built a visual language around one simple four letter word.

There are worse things to become obsessed with than love.

Spend enough time around Los Angeles and eventually you might come across four letters painted across a wall:

L O V E.

Sometimes they’re surrounded by colors and imagery pulled from the neighborhood. Sometimes culture gets embedded directly into the letters. Sometimes they’re enormous.

Behind them is Jayson Love Valencia, one of the artists behind LOVE CREW and, in my experience, one sick ass foo.

I mean that with love, obviously.

Every once in a while, Jayson and I randomly cross paths somewhere in Los Angeles. An event. An art show. Most recently, somehow, a goth club.

Every time, it’s a chance to catch up about art, culture, projects and whatever is happening in our respective worlds. And every time I’m reminded of how much I respect what he’s built. Because underneath all the murals, traveling and hustle is an incredibly simple idea:

Spread love.

Whatever that means to you.

Making LOVE His Language

Jayson came from graffiti culture, but over the years that visual language has grown far beyond simply putting his name on a wall.

LOVE became the name.

The word became the canvas.

And inside those four letters, almost anything can live.

Neighborhoods. Salvadoran imagery. Social messages. Local landmarks. Memories. People.

I’ve seen him bring that work to nonprofits, restaurants, community spaces and walls throughout Los Angeles. He’ll work with a homie. He’ll work with an organization. He’ll jump on a plane and take the work somewhere completely different.

What I appreciate is that the message doesn’t need some ten paragraph artist statement to understand it.

It’s LOVE.

That’s it.

And in a world where everybody seems to be trying to make themselves louder, angrier or more important than the next person, there’s something refreshing about somebody repeatedly writing love on walls.

Cultura Inside Four Letters

We got to experience that firsthand when Jayson collaborated with us for Cultura Fest 2025.

We asked him to create a shirt, and he took his signature LOVE design and filled it with pieces of the world we were trying to celebrate: Bay Area landmarks, Salvadoran culture and imagery connected to our community.

That’s what makes his format interesting to me. LOVE stays recognizable, but what lives inside it can change depending on where he is and who he’s creating for. It becomes almost like a vessel for culture. And lately, that vessel has been traveling.

From L.A. to Japan 🇸🇻🇯🇵

Jayson recently spent time in Japan sharing his artwork.

Yes, I’m jealous.

I’ve wanted to go to Japan forever. But our conversation about it went somewhere I found much more interesting.

He talked about the respect and curiosity he encountered around our culture abroad. That eventually led us to joking about Japan’s fascination with Chicano culture: lowriders, graffiti, fashion, music and the visual language surrounding all of it.

There’s a well established subculture in Japan that has spent decades engaging deeply with Chicano and lowrider culture.

So naturally our joke became:

Central Americans are next. 😂

But underneath the joke, I actually think there’s something worth thinking about.

What does Salvadoran visual culture look like when it becomes recognizable outside our own community?

What are the images, sounds, clothes, characters and symbols that someone will eventually see and immediately think:

El Salvador.

Mexican and Chicano culture have spent generations building visual languages that now travel globally. Salvadoran American culture is still developing many of its contemporary equivalents.

That’s exciting.

Because it means artists like Jayson aren’t simply participating in culture. They’re helping create the visual vocabulary for whatever comes next.

Where Graffiti Meets Hip Hop

Of course, you can’t talk to Jayson for very long without eventually getting into hip hop.

He’s a hip hop head.

I’m a hip hop head.

And graffiti itself is inseparable from the history of hip hop culture.

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So when I photographed him recently, I had to ask:

Who is a Salvadoran rapper people should be paying attention to?

His answer was Feefa. And that got my brain going.

There is a generation of Salvadoran and Salvadoran American artists occupying different corners of music right now. Feefa. Crooked Stilo. Dirty Sosa. Harlay. And plenty of others I’m probably not aware of yet.

I don’t even think we’ve reached the point where we can definitively say what “Salvadoran hip hop” is supposed to sound or look like.

Maybe that’s the fun part. We’re still making it. And because graffiti and hip hop have always spoken to each other, I want to see these Salvadoran creative worlds collide more often.

Give me Feefa wearing a LOVE CREW piece in a music video.

Give me Jayson designing the set.

Give me Salvadoran imagery colliding with the neon visual language he experienced in Japan.

Give me rappers, muralists, filmmakers, photographers, designers and chefs borrowing from each other’s worlds.

That’s how a culture develops.

Not because somebody sits in a room and decides what Salvadoran American culture is supposed to be. Because a bunch of people make shit, collaborate, experiment, influence one another and eventually somebody looks around and realizes:

Oh. We built something.

A Little Tough LOVE

Before we finished taking portraits, there was one detail Jayson really wanted me to photograph.

His ring.

Stamped across it, naturally, was LOVE.

Which means if Jayson ever smacks you upside the head, technically he’s just giving you a little tough love. Sorry. I had to.

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Photographing that detail also reminded me why I’ve grown to enjoy making these portraits so much.

The camera becomes an excuse.

You stop someone for a few minutes. You talk shop. You exchange ideas. You ask what they’re working on. They show you something they’re excited about. You make a photograph together. It’s an exchange of energy and respect between artists. And that’s what this particular encounter felt like.

I don’t know exactly what Salvadoran American art will look like twenty years from now.

I don’t know which musicians will become icons, which murals will survive, which restaurants will become institutions or which images future generations will point toward when they’re trying to understand this moment.

That’s exactly why I think it’s worth documenting now.

We’re still early.

People like Jayson are traveling, painting, collaborating, hustling and putting pieces of our culture into places where they haven’t existed before.

And he’s doing it with four letters anyone in the world can understand:

LOVE.

Thank you, Jayson, for the portrait, the conversations, the Cultura Fest collaboration and for always talking game whenever our paths cross.

Keep painting. We’ll keep documenting. Maybe we’ll meet somewhere in Japan next time. 🇸🇻🇯🇵

Faces of Cultura is an Archila Bros series documenting the artists, musicians, chefs, filmmakers, designers and other people helping shape Salvadoran and Central American culture.

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